Ascender Galaxy Proxy is now open source

Ascender Galaxy Proxy is now open source. Teams that run Ansible pull their collections through it and get local-speed downloads that hold up even when the public Ansible Galaxy service is busy. CIQ built the proxy as part of the Ascender Pro automation suite and released it to the community to run, extend, and contribute to.

Ansible Galaxy is the public repository where the community and vendors publish collections, the packaged modules and roles that playbooks depend on. A single playbook can pull collections from many different authors on every run. Ascender Galaxy Proxy sits between your automation and that public service and keeps a local copy of everything you request.

Ascender Galaxy Proxy caches every collection your automation requests, so the second pull and every pull after it comes from your own network.

Serve Ansible collections from inside your own network

Point your organization at the proxy, and Ascender routes collection requests through it. The first request for a collection travels to Ansible Galaxy, returns the content, and stores it. Every request after that comes straight from the cache. Queries, versions, and downloads all live on your side of the connection once the first fetch completes.

The result is a collection pull that behaves the same way every time. A job that used to wait on a remote lookup now resolves against content that already sits next to your automation.

Keep runs fast when the upstream is under load

Ansible Galaxy is a shared public service behind a content delivery network, and the entire Ansible community depends on it. Scheduled automation tends to fire on the hour, so collection lookups can stretch to minutes during peak windows. A busy upstream slows down every run that reaches for a collection. This is a hard problem for any team that runs automation at scale on a fixed schedule.

A cache removes the dependency for repeat pulls. Once a collection lives in the proxy, your runs stop competing for the public service and read from local storage instead. When the upstream has a rough moment, the runs that depend on already-cached collections keep moving.

A local cache turns a collection pull from a round trip across the internet into a request that stays inside your own datacenter.

More on this release. Read what's new in Ascender Pro.

Run it as a single small container

Ascender Galaxy Proxy ships as one container of roughly 20 MB. A platform team stands it up, points automation at it, and operates it without a heavy back end.

Other open source Galaxy proxies exist. Ascender Galaxy Proxy keeps the footprint small on purpose, so the people who run it spend their time on automation rather than on the cache. Because the project is open source, teams read the code, file issues, and send changes back upstream.

Pair it with Registry when you need version control

Ascender Galaxy Proxy caches whatever your playbooks ask for. It does not decide which versions you get. Teams that want to pin specific collection versions or host their own private collections use Ascender Registry, the commercial application in the Ascender Pro suite.

Use the proxy when you want speed with no maintenance overhead, and add Registry when you need to control exactly which collection versions run.

	Ascender Galaxy Proxy	Ascender Registry
Licensing	Open source	Commercial (Ascender Pro)
Role	Caches the collections you request	Curates, versions, and hosts collections
Private content	Serves upstream collections	Hosts your own private collections
Best for	Fast, low-maintenance caching	Version control and private content

The two work together, and the proxy helps even teams already running Registry. In a representative deployment with dozens of remote sites, a platform team runs one central Registry and places a Galaxy Proxy at each site. Each site caches the collections it pulls from that central Registry, so automation runs without dragging the same content across thin links to the central location again and again. The same setup suits air-gapped environments, where every collection has to arrive and stay inside a controlled boundary.